Corruption, integrity, ethics and money in politics are among the reasons many voters say they went to the polls for the midterm election.
Hungarian police took ex-leader Viktor Orban's brother into custody on Monday, according to a press report shared by Prime Minister Peter Magyar.
The unofficial Trump adviser and conservative social media influencer announced she's taking a break at quite the moment. read more
The attorney general defended the surveillance technology and dismissed privacy concerns as "misinformation." read more
The Federal Aviation Administration still uses computers that require floppy disks. read more
Flock lawsuits test legal limits of license-plate reader networks
www.reuters.com
... Does your right to privacy end when you back out of your driveway?
That question is driving a flurry of lawsuits against Flock Safety and others over cameras that automatically read and record the license plates of passing vehicles.
Plaintiffs' lawyers are united in arguing the technology enables police to conduct unlawful mass surveillance, generating billions of scans each month showing the location and movement of cars on roads across the country.
Where they diverge is in identifying a viable legal theory for their challenges. Are the scans an illegal search in violation of the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment? Do they run afoul of state privacy statutes? Is Flock's network of about 120,000 cameras across 49 states negligently designed and operated? ...
He TACO'd.
Trump says he "was kidding" when he offered UFC CEO Dana White the White House press secretary role
www.cbsnews.com
Big Daddy Graham- Walk On The Mild Side (1984)
www.youtube.com
Why did I post this song?
Well, maybe the Democrats need to take a step back and look more towards the long-term, and stop relishing in their current amazing win.
That is, maybe the Democrats need to be more ~mild.~
Then there's this ...
The US election showed growing frustration with Israel on both sides of the aisle
apnews.com
... In the space of about 24 hours, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested cutting off aid to Israel, a staunch critic of Israel won a key Senate race and the vice president partly blamed his own party's landslide defeat on U.S.-Israel relations.
The rupture caused by Israel's devastating military campaign in Gaza and the jointly launched war with Iran has shredded bipartisan U.S. support for Israel that goes back decades. Democrats are fiercely divided over Israel, and Republicans are increasingly critical of its actions.
In Israel, critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accuse him of having mismanaged relations with the country's closest ally. But the divide runs much deeper, and is likely to persist even if a new government is formed after last week's elections.
On the left, Americans increasingly see Israel as an international pariah because of the war in Gaza and violent settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. On the right, some see Israel as having undermined Trump's "America First" pledge, accusing it of dragging the U.S. into a costly and unnecessary war with Iran.
"Something fundamental has shifted," said Michael Oren, a historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. "My working assumption is that the call to cut off military aid is just the beginning." ...
Related ...
OpenAI boss Sam Altman spells out how and why the AI industry wants to slow down: We could lose control' (September 2026)
www.cnbc.com
... AI bosses have since shown a rare display of unity, with both Altman and Musk on Saturday backing an essay from Amodei that urged AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models. ...
Sam Altman sets out 2 ways AI could go 'very badly'
"We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI," Altman said in a post on X just after midnight on Monday, adding that "no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness."
Altman warned of two ways AI progress could go "very badly," including losing "control of the future to AI" and too much power concentrating around a single person or company.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington are scrambling to address calls for safeguards. ...
Probably more than you may want to read ...
Why Was the Electoral College Created? (October 2025)
www.history.com
...At the time of the Philadelphia convention, no other country in the world directly elected its chief executive, so the delegates were wading into uncharted territory. Further complicating the task was a deep-rooted distrust of executive power. After all, the fledgling nation had just fought its way out from under a tyrannical king and overreaching colonial governors. They didn't want another despot on their hands.
One group of delegates felt strongly that Congress shouldn't have anything to do with picking the president. Too much opportunity for chummy corruption between the executive and legislative branches.
Another camp was dead set against letting the people elect the president by a straight popular vote. First, they thought 18th-century voters lacked the resources to be fully informed about the candidates, especially in rural outposts. Second, they feared a headstrong "democratic mob" steering the country astray. And third, a populist president appealing directly to the people could command dangerous amounts of power.
Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn't be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent "electors" who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency.
Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise
But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn't the Founders include slaves in counting a state's population?
In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people, who couldn't vote. James Madison from Virginia"where enslaved people accounted for 60 percent of the population"knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn't fly in the South.
"The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States," said Madison, "and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes."
The result was the controversial "three-fifths compromise," in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, home to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46). ...
More from the article ...
... While economic pressures were a driving issue in the midterm elections this week, voters pointed with similar intensity to another priority: They care about the values and behavior of the officials they elect.
And they expect better.
Tillie Ann McHone, a delivery driver who cast her vote in Commerce City, Colorado, trained her focus on President Donald Trump. In the midterms, Democratic candidates regularly accused Mr. Trump of using the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his wealthy allies.
"What are we paying taxes for at this point if he's going to take all our taxpayer money and just give it to rich people?" she told the Monitor on Election Day. "I want Trump out of office."
Mr. Trump wasn't on the ballot, but voters sent him and his Republican Party a clear message, giving Democrats wide majorities in both branches of Congress with victories in many parts of the country that voted for him two years ago. In the 2026 SSRS Voter Poll, conducted on Election Day, 90% of voters said that corruption was a crucial or major problem, at least as important as inflation, immigration enforcement, and the war in Iran.
The concern surged to the forefront, to an unusual degree, at a time when Mr. Trump has drawn scrutiny for, among other actions, family business dealings that have continued apace during his time in office. ...